faculty

5 Professor Personalities That Make BC Law Great

/ Reilly Doak / Leave a comment

In honor of BC Law earning a #8 spot on Princeton Review’s 2023 Law School Rankings: Best Professors list, I have attempted to distill the five most common BC Law Professor personality types that make them the best of the best. As a disclaimer, there are undoubtedly fantastic professors who were not mentioned on this list due to my limited experience and response sample size. Additionally, many professors will fit into multiple categories, and other amazing professors are in a category of their own that did not make the list for the sake of brevity.

Without further ado:

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Welcoming Our New Professors

/ tesshalpern / Leave a comment

As we pass the midpoint of the semester, you current students may already be thinking about the courses you’ll want to take in the spring. To ensure you can weigh your options effectively, you’ll need to learn a little bit about the professors, including their backgrounds and areas of expertise.

Even if you know most of the familiar faces on campus, you may have been unable to get acquainted with some of the newcomers who joined our community this fall. It’s an impressive list! The school’s newest full-time faculty (Thomas Mitchell, Lisa Alexander, Jenna Cobb, Felipe Ford Cole, and Bijal Shah) come from a diverse range of backgrounds and have brought their experience into our classrooms, teaching everything from property and constitutional law to immigration and international investment law.

On top of these five new full-time professors, Jeffery Robinson has joined the School as the Rappaport Distinguished Visiting Professor this year, and Cosmas Emeziem as the 2022-2024 Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor. Finally, Aziz Rana is coming to BC Law, first as Provost’s Distinguished Fellow in 2023–2024, and then as the J. Donald Monan, SJ, Chair in Law and Government in 2024.

To learn more about our new faculty, read their bios in the BC Law Magazine, or visit BC Law’s faculty directory.

Faculty Spotlight: Professor Mark Brodin

/ Roma Gujarathi / Leave a comment

I had Professor Brodin for Civil Procedure during 1L, and I had a great time in his class. I also ended up taking Evidence with him during my 2L year, which was actually one of my favorite law school classes. I am currently in his employment discrimination class this semester, as well. I recently had the chance to interview him and learn a bit more about his background, his BC Law story, and his hidden talent for music.

To begin, can you tell us a bit about your background?

I was born in the Bronx and then moved to Queens as a young child. Around age 9, we moved to Long Island, where I went to public school. I moved back to Manhattan for both college and law school at Columbia. After law school, I moved up here to Boston since I ended up clerking for a judge at the federal district court here.

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Faculty Spotlight: Professor Brian Quinn

/ Thomas R. Blakely / Leave a comment

Recently I sat down with Prof. Brian Quinn as part of the faculty spotlight series.

Prof. Quinn’s class was the first class I ever had at BC Law (at 9 am on August 31st, 2020, my first day of law school no less) and while I have yet to take other classes with him, he’s appeared on our podcast, and has been a mentor and a voice of reason for me. When I was asked to write a profile of a professor for the faculty spotlight series, I figured Prof. Quinn would be a good choice.

Tell me about yourself and your career.

I lived life by accident. If you look at my resume in reverse it begins to make sense, but I did not have much of a plan. I’m from Westfield, New Jersey and received my undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. My mom is from Spain, and I spent my summers there when I was younger. In college, I felt like I had to take up something like Latin American studies, but found it boring. I accepted an opportunity sophomore year to work at a refugee camp in the Philippines for Vietnamese refugees in the late 1980s. 

I saw it as an escape, learned some Vietnamese, and upon returning to Georgetown received an offer to travel to Vietnam as the first undergraduate student from Georgetown to visit there following the Vietnam War.

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Faculty Spotlight: Daniel Lyons 

/ Travis Salters / Leave a comment

When you first encounter Professor Daniel Lyons standing in front of your Property class, you may be intimidated by the impeccable three-piece suit, astonishing poise and brilliance, and, of course, the iconic fedora. His cold calls have left many trembling to this day. Yet, I can say definitively that Professor Lyons is one of the best professors on our campus. It’s no surprise that the school chose him to serve as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the next few years. 

I sat down with Professor Lyons to pull back the curtain a bit and highlight a different, lighter, more familiar side of one of BC Law’s best. 

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Faculty Spotlight: Professor James Repetti

/ Melissa Gaglia / Leave a comment

BC Law Impact Editor’s Note: We pride ourselves at Boston College Law School on our unique community that cultivates an incredible student body with a brilliant faculty. This post is part of an ongoing faculty spotlight Q&A series to help students get to know the members of our faculty on a more personal level. It will run throughout the next year.

  1. Why did you choose to teach at BC Law?
    I am a graduate. I think that it’s a great law school and that the students are fantastic. I couldn’t imagine teaching anywhere else. 
  1. What is your favorite thing about BC?
    The students–still attracting really nice people to study here, and I think that’s a real plus. 
  1. What is your favorite BC Memory?
    That’s a tough one. Probably my favorite memories are of Sanford Katz and Peter Donovan, two fantastic faculty members here. I had the pleasure of taking their courses when I was a student. 
  1. If you were on a baseball team what would your walkout song be?
    Sweet Caroline, keeping with my Boston roots.   
  1. If you weren’t a professor or a lawyer, what would you be doing? What is your dream job?
    Probably I would be in medicine.
  1. What is your favorite thing about Boston?
    I grew up in Boston. I would say the Boston Harbor and the ocean. I spent a lot of time running around Castle Island, a park in South Boston, when I was a kid.
  2. If someone visiting Boston asked you what is the one thing they had to do, what would you tell them?
    Definitely go to a Red Sox game–and do the Harbor walk.

The inaugural holder of the William J. Kenealy, S.J. Chair, Professor Repetti is co-author of the texts, Partnership Income Taxation, Introduction to United States International Taxation, Federal Wealth Transfer Taxation, Problems in Federal Wealth Transfer Taxation, and Tax Aspects of Organizing and Operating a Business. He is also a contributing author to the treatises, Comparative Income Taxation: A Structural Analysis and to The International Guide to Partnerships. For more, visit Professor Repetti’s website.

Melissa Gaglia is a second-year student at BC Law. Contact her at gagliam@bc.edu.

Faculty Spotlight: Professor Mary Ann Chirba

/ Jonathan Bertulis-Fernandes / Leave a comment

BC Law Impact Editor’s Note: We pride ourselves at Boston College Law School on our unique community that cultivates an incredible student body with a brilliant faculty. The BC Impact Blog is launching a faculty spotlight Q&A series to highlight the members of our faculty throughout the next year.

Easily one of my favorite 1L classes has been Law Practice. Known as “LP” to all BC Law students, Law Practice focuses on teaching students the practical skills that they will use everyday in their eventual careers as attorneys. Students spend a great deal of time mastering legal writing and research, learning the Bluebook and system of legal citations as well as how to use research tools such as Lexis and Westlaw. Writing their objective office memo (a memo offering an objective analysis of a legal issue for an internal audience) is a rite of passage for BC law students, and was easily one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences of my first semester. Second semester sees a pivot to advocacy skills, with students learning the basics of oral argument and shifting to writing for an external audience such as briefs for courts.

For this week’s blog I sat down with Professor Mary Ann Chirba to learn a bit more about her background and teaching at BC. Beloved by students, Professor Chirba is a full-time member of BC’s Law Practice Faculty as well as teaching other law and undergraduate courses. 

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Professors: Try Wearing Costumes Year-Round

/ Dan Riley / Leave a comment

By the time this blog is posted, Halloween will have just passed and Election Day will be right around the corner. As I don’t want my hair to be completely grey or completely gone by the time I turn 26, in this post I am going to focus on the less frightening of the two.

This past Thursday, tax law extraordinaire Professor Oei kept the mood light by wearing a full-body Appa costume to remote-class in both the spirit of Halloween and also in light of the shared experience many of us had watching (or re-watching) Avatar: The Last Airbender when it was released on Netflix right at the start of the Covid-19 quarantine.  “Appa” is a flying sky bison from the television show, pictured below, and if you needed that explained to you then (1) shame on you, but (2) go watch the show because you’re in for a real treat.

How could the Appa costume have possibly been tied into our discussion of statutory deductions for business and trade expenses in the Internal Revenue Code, you ask? With a little bit of creative lawyering, Professor Oei found a way.

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Businesses Want Governments on Stand-by for Coronavirus Relief

/ Roma Gujarathi / Leave a comment

Today I am hosting the second in a series of guest blogs by Irit Tamir, an adjunct professor at BC Law who teaches Business and Human Rights. The first post is here. Professor Tamir is also the Director of Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department. In her role, she is focused on working with companies to ensure that their business practices result in positive social and environmental impacts for vulnerable communities throughout the world. She leads Oxfam America’s work on business and development including shareholder engagement, value chain assessments, and collaborative advocacy initiatives, such as the successful “Behind the Brands” campaign.

Seven years since the Rana Plaza disaster, the COVID-19 crisis is a stark reminder how businesses have a responsibility to their supply chain workers.

The COVID19 pandemic highlights, more than any recent crisis, the duty of Governments to provide social protection. For workers, social protection ensures strong labor policies, living wages, safe and healthy working conditions, and the ability to have a voice in the workplace — in particular, to raise issues when they arise without fear of retribution. It also means there is a safety net in place when disaster strikes and workers and producers are no longer able to make a living by providing unemployment compensation, sick leave, and insurance.

But, many governments have not lived up to this duty, because they lack the resources to be able to do so, they espouse a race to the bottom approach in attracting foreign investment, and/or because they have been corrupted by business sector influence.

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